E-manufacturing is concerned with the use of the Internet and e-business technologies in manufacturing industries, and covers all aspects of manufacturing—sales, marketing, customer service, new product development, procurement, supplier relationships, logistics, manufacturing, strategy development and so on. The Internet also affects products as well since it is possible to use Internet technologies to add new product functions and to provide new services.
New technologies are revolutionizing the way manufacturing and supply chain management is implemented. These changes are delivering manufacturing firms the competitive advantage of a highly responsive supply chain and manufacturing system to ensure that they meet the high expectations of their customers, who, in today's economy, demand absolutely the best service, price, delivery time and product quality.
Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) provide up-to-the-minute mission-critical information about production activities across the factory and supply chain via communications networks (e.g., Local Area Networks), resulting in the optimization of activities throughout all aspects of the manufacturing process.
In order to remain competitive, semiconductor wafer manufacturers seek to continuously improve overall equipment and manufacturing effectiveness. To facilitate these improvements, IC makers are increasingly implementing computer-based applications to employ such techniques as equipment health monitoring, fault detection and classification, run-to-run control, predictive and preventative maintenance, collection and analysis of data from manufacturing equipment, equipment productivity monitoring, in-line defect monitoring, integrated metrology, the reduction or elimination of non-product wafers, equipment matching, and many others.
A problem with the automation software utilized in the manufacturing equipment for semiconductor and related microelectronics is that existing solutions are created with many lines of custom code or threads written in programming languages such as C, C++, C#, or Java. This programming methodology originated in Research Labs and Universities where the advanced manufacturing processes were developed and proven. These same processes and associated automation software have been moved to manufacturing equipment without change, in an attempt to maintain the original results. Optimization and maintenance of these islands of custom code have created a major obstacle for an information-enabled, high volume manufacturing environment.
At the same time, the industry is attempting to lower costs, reduced time to market, reduced start-up time and, greater reliability and availability of the equipment. The industry is reacting to the need to connect these islands of custom code while optimizing the manufacturing processes. Standards organizations are sponsoring multiple semiconductor specific standards that have been written or are being developed to define an e-Manufacturing environment. This environment focuses on optimizing the manufacturing processes by accessing process data and applying analysis and corrective actions within equipment and across multiple pieces of equipment. This approach, based on extending the existing code base, has created a more complex environment and at this point, not achieving the cost, manufacturing and optimization goals. This problem has not been completely solved to date and the pieces that exist are mainly custom software code.
There is an unmet need in industry to provide improved manufacturing methodologies in the semiconductor and/or microelectronics industry.